This study investigates Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe's claim in "The Caesura of the Speculative" that Hölderlin is a "modern" writer. Its aim is to establish what is at stake in this claim and to evaluate whether it can be substantiated. In Chapter One I discuss the relationship between tragedy and philosophy. I show that the uneasy relationship between philosophy and the arts is premised upon Plato's understanding and judgement of mimesis. I contrast Plato and Aristotle's treatment of poetry by examining how they understand the mimetic process. In Chapter Two I focus on Hölderlin's understanding of the relationship between Ancient Greece and 18th Century Germany. After discussing the background to Hölderlin's work I provide detailed readings of two texts, The Perspective from which We Have to Look at Antiquity, (1799) and the first letter to Böhlendorff, dating from 1801. I argue that in these texts Hölderlin, through his acknowledgement of the divided nature of Greek culture, offers a unique understanding of the relationship between Greece and Germany which isolates him from his contemporaries. In Chapters Three and Four, I examine Hölderlin's understanding of tragedy. After establishing the centrality of the aesthetic presentation for Hölderlin's project I examine the "poetological" writings which date from 1798-1800. I give a close analysis of the implications of Hölderlin's statement that the tragic "is the metaphor of an intellectual intuition" which occurs in the text On the Difference of the Poetic Modes, (1800), showing why the tragic form is central to Hölderlin's poetological project. To illustrate the problems inherent in this project, in Chapter Four I examine Hölderlin's attempts to write a tragic drama which corresponds to his theoretical beliefs. I discuss the two theoretical texts - The Ground to Empedocles and Becoming in Dissolution - which accompany Hölderlin's drama Empedocles. In analysing these texts I argue that there is an inherent tension between the presuppositions of the theory and the way they can be realised in the drama. In Chapter Five, I turn to Hölderlin's final work, his project to translate Sophocles' tragedies. Through close analysis of the theoretical Remarks which accompany the translations, I show how Hölderlin's theoretical and poetological interests in Greece and Tragedy are brought together through this project. I argue that these texts give an insight into the problems which confront Hölderlin's poetological project. However, simultaneously, these texts provide an alternative way of understanding the function of the tragic form. In this discussion I show how the questions concerning the status of dramatic mimesis and the "mimetic" relation between Greece and Germany coincide in the analysis of Sophocles' dramas. In conclusion I return briefly to the questions that I raised in the introduction concerning the status of tragedy in the present time, and assess the accuracy of the claim that Hölderlin is a "modern" thinker.

This study argues that a theory of the distinctively human Individual lies latent within Deleuze's readings of Hume and Bergson and his two major metaphysical treatises. This evolving theory derives from efforts to re-think the concept of 'the subject' In terms of 'difference', 'becoming', 'repetition' and 'event'. Using critical exegesis, the study shows that Deleuze's model is precise and workable, capable of supplanting discredited accounts of the subject and nullifying charges that Deleuze is an 'anti-humanist'. Deleuze's subject is neither pre-existent nor stable, but always in the process of becoming-other, Individuated by Inherent differences. Chapter 1 argues that Deleuze's account (and several theoretical resources) can be traced to an early engagement with empiricism, where he uses Humean atomism to define a field of difference 'within which' associationist psychological tendencies define the subject as a 'fiction'. As Chapter 2 shows, weaknesses in this model lead Deleuze to Bergson. Having adopted Bergsonlan Intuition as his method, Deleuze seeks after the preconditions of the flow and temporality of consciousness. He determines that the subjects constitutive moment is the virtual point of intersection between the physicality of material objects and the 'inner life' of consciousness. Chapter 3 turns to questions of ontology and ethics, arguing that Deleuze's theory of internal difference accounts for the role of contingent circumstances In subject-formation whilst his theory of the event establishes each lived moment as unique. Deleuze Interprets Nietzsche's eternal return as an ontological device entailing the recurrence of difference in the lived time of the subject's 'becoming', and as the means for coherence between the moments of a life. This theory leads Deleuze to an 'ethics of the event' with the goal of transforming human thinking from a concentration on unity and identity towards a more creative and fulfilling life of becoming.

One of the main influences on Judith Butler‘s thinking has been the work of Michel Foucault. Although this relationship is often commented on, it is rarely discussed in any detail. My thesis makes a contribution in this area. It presents an analysis of Foucault‘s work with the aim of countering Butler‘s representation of his thinking. In the first part of the thesis, I show how Butler initially interprets Foucault‘s project through Nietzschean genealogy, psychoanalysis and Derridean discourse, and how she later develops this interpretation in line with the progress of her own project. In the main part of the thesis, I present an analysis of Foucault‘s thinking in the period from The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) to The History of Sexuality volume 1 (1976). This analysis focuses on the aspect of his work which has most influenced Butler‘s thinking: namely the notion of a relationship between knowledge, discourse and power. The other issues in his work which Butler addresses—genealogy, the subject, the body, abnormality, and sexuality—are discussed within this framework. I show how, in the early 1970s, Foucault develops the notion of power-knowledge, and sets out a relationship between power-knowledge and discourse which is overlooked by Butler. I argue that Butler interprets Foucaultian power through the notions of repression and social norms, and ignores the concepts of technology and strategy which form a key part of Foucault‘s thinking. I show how, from The Archaeology of Knowledge on, Foucault develops a socio-historical ontology and a genealogy of the subject, both of which are at variance with Butler‘s interpretation of his thinking.

This thesis is a study of the two major texts of Derrida on Husserl's phenomenology. Engaging in a close reading of Introduction to the Origin of Geometry (1962) and Speech and Phenomena (1967), this thesis tries to bring together, and reconstruct, under the title of speech and writing, those Husserlian questions which never stop occuping, motivating and intriguing Derrida's thought, from his student studies and the Introduction to Rogues (2003) These were the questions or themes of origin and of historicity, of scientific objectivity and truth, of reason and responsibility, as well as of the living present, of living speech, of egological subjectivity and the alter ego. The question that this thesis raises is the following: why are these Husserlian themes of historicity, of the idea of the infinite task, of the living speech, etc., not simply the first objects or targets, subsequently to be abandoned, of Derridean deconstruction? Why is deconstruction, the event, the advent or invention of deconstruction, irreducible to some methodical or theoretical procedure, or to an operation of problematization or delegitimation of transcendental questioning? As we show in the first part of the thesis, these questions were investigated and developed by Husserl as a "responsible" response to the Crisis of the European sciences and humanity. Our investigation into Husserl's teleological discourse of history and responsibility shows that this crisis, which is anything but an empirical accident, threatens the very thing that Husserl wants to keep safe and sound (or to immunize, as Derrida writes in Rogues): the transcendental freedom of an egological subjectivity. For Husserl the possibility of crisis (of the subject) remains linked with the moment of truth, i.e., with the production and tradition of scientific objectitivities, and in fact has an essential link to writing. Husserl's teleological determination of writing as phonetic writing is an attempt to limit, tame and economize the essential ambiguity of writing: it threatens with passivity, forgetfulness and irresponsibility the very thing that makes possible, i.e., the transcendental and ideal community of a we-human-subjects- investigators-responsible-for-the-history-of-truth/reason. In the second part of the thesis, following Derrida's reading of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena, in Form and Meaning, Signature Event Context, and Eating Well, we show that Husserl's phenomenology of language and of phone is also a great philosophy of the transcendental subject. The essential and phenomenological distinctions between nonlinguistic and linguistic signs, sense and meaning, expression and indication, which are at the centre of Husserl's doctrine of signification, have also a teleological character: they are destined to define the limit, the arche and telos of language, as human language or human (i.e., phonetic) writing. In our reading we give great emphasis to Derrida's phenomenological analysis and deconstruction of this unique experience of auto-affection, the experience of hearing oneself speak. This is the experience of the human subject, the experience of a free, voluntary, auto-affecting egological subjectivity conscious of its voice, its speech and its humanity. Denying the possibility of phonic auto-affection of the human subject, in favour of the hetero-affection of writing was never the point of Derridean deconstruction. Deconstruction, the concept of writing or arche-writing, the graphics of differance, of iterability, are not imposed from the outside on Husserl's discourse on the human subject, the zoon logon echon. Rather, phenomenology itself interrupts or deconstructs itself, according to Derrida, as soon as it addresses the question of time and of the other, of the alter ego. Deconstruction was never only a thcoretico-philosophical, or academic affair. In our conclusion, we argue for the right of deconstruction, i.e., the right or demand to deconstruction. This right or demand to deconstruction, to ask questions about truth, consciousness, language, responsibility and so forth - so many powers, capacities or possibilities of which the animal is said to be deprived and poor - and the right or demand to do so performatively, by writing, by transforming and producing new analyses, new events and texts, new events of thought in the history of the concepts of man, of truth, of the subject and of human rights, is according to Derrida, an ethical and political demand.

This thesis examines the question of living nature and its bearing on ecological thought in the light or the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The difficulty of adequately thinking about living nature in the terms developed in Being and Time (1927) is taken as the starting point for the investigation. The thesis concentrates on Heidegger's thought in the period beginning with the 1929/30 lectures The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude and ending with the courses on Heraclitus in 1943 and 1944. In this 'middle period' Heidegger' attempts to fonnulate a phenomenology of animal life and then a thinking of the place of living nature in the 'history of being' which does not return to the vitalist principles with which he had previously broken. The thesis considers the extent to which these attempts to find another way to think about living nature are successful. To this end a variety of lecture and seminar courses together with manuscripts from this period are discussed, some of which have only recently become available, including the seminars on Nietzsche's second Untimely Meditation and Herder's Treatise on the Origin ofLanguage and the manuscripts Besinnung and Die Geschichte des Seyns. Contemporary responses to Heidegger's thinking of living nature and its relevance for philosophical ecology, including those of Jacques Derrida, Michel Haar, Giorgio Agamben and Michael Zimmennan are re-evaluated on this basis. -. :'. j,- Abstract - The guiding concept of the investigation is the notion of poverty, which plays a variety of roles in the context under discussion. In particular, the thesis presented in The Fundamental Concept of Metaphysics that the animal is 'poor in world', has been seriously misunderstood by many commentators. If the poverty in question is properly understood as a thesiS concerning the fundamental attunement of the encounter between Dasein and living nature, then we can see how this concept of poverty develops in various directions in the following years, informing Heidegger's understanding of the capabilities of living beings, of the 'earth', the silence of language and finally allows for the development of a thinking of freedom that is proper to the earth itself, rather than a development beyond the earthly. It is argued that the notion of poverty is an essential counter to a prevalent Spinozist and Nietzschean strain in ecological thought that thinks living nature on the basis of plenum or overflow and concedes no space for a true freedom of the earth.

In this work, I present an interpretation of two thinkers, Foucault and Arendt. I place these thinkers within a tradition of critical theory running from Kant to Nietzsche. The opposition between modernism and postmodernism, between its philosophical sources, Kant and Nietzsche, has been widely overstated, for example, in the polemical stance taken by Habermas in The Philosophical Discourse ofModenfity (1987). 1 am concerned to show that this way of mapping does Foucault and Arendt an injustice. Foucault and Arendt accept Nietzsche's critique of reason and Western thought and attack Kant's official philosophy, an analytical philosophy of truth. Yet they also appropriate Kant's reflection on the Enlightenment and revolution (Foucault) and his aesthetic judgment (Arendt). More importantly, Foucault and Arendt embrace postmodern sensibility not as an absolute given but as an attitude that must be - at the risk of inviting Nietzschean scorn - constantly checked and examined. For them, critique is based as much on a serious and sustained interrogation of historical experience as it is on a deconstruction of metaphysical philosophy. Recognizing the problems of attaching labels to Foucault's work and that of Arendt, I focus on the tensions and complexity of their work. There are tensions in Foucault's thought between totalizing/detotalizing impulses, discursive/extra-discursive theorization, macro/micro perspectives, and domination/resistance relations as well as between ethical-political commitments and archaeological detachment. There are also tensions in Arendt's thought between creative rupture and exercise in retrieval, between agonism and consensus as well as between existential engagement and philosophical withdrawal. Critical thought, which is experiment as well as problematization, must constantly live within a field of tension. In this light, I argue that these tensions provide the elements for the uniqueness and coherence of their work and that viewing these tensions as a source of flagrant contradiction fundamentally distorts their intentions.

In this thesis I provide an interpretation of Kant's theories of knowledge, nature, and being in order to argue that Kant's ontology is a productive ontology: it is a theory of being that includes a notion of production. I aim to show that Kant's epistemology and philosophy of nature are based on a theory of being as productivity. The thesis contributes to knowledge in that it considers in detail Kant's ontology and theory of being, topics which have generally been ignored or misunderstood. In arguing for Kant's productive ontology, I argue against Heidegger's interpretation of Kant, which states that Kant understands being as "produced permanent presence" or as divinely created materiality. Based on Kant's definition of being as positing, I argue, by contrast to Heidegger, that Kant understands being as the original productive relation between subject and object. This can also be expressed as the relation between formality and materiality, or between epistemic conditions and existence, that is productive of objects of experience. Being is not producedness but a relation of productivity, through which both subject and object are themselves productive. The subject is productive in its spontaneity, and nature, determined as dynamical interaction, is interpreted as productive. The subject, I will argue, does not understand nature as produced, but approaches it with a comportment towards its production as object of experience. Because of its own subjective productivity - spontaneity or "life" - the subject has a "productive comportment" towards nature. Ontology, I claim, concerns the realm of the productive relation of being, the realm of the relation between epistemic conditions and existence, and therefore the realm of possible experience. This marks Kant as divergent not only from what Heidegger calls "the ontology of the extant", but also from the concept-based ontology of the German rationalists. The general aims of the thesis are, first, to argue that being for Kant is the original relation between subject and object, and that ontology concerns this relation; second, to argue that ontology and being are understood in terms of production and productivity; and third, to argue that Heidegger is wrong to ascribe to Kant an understanding of being as "produced pennanent presence". I approach these aims by examining a number of Kant's texts in detail, focusing particularly on Kant's theses about existence and being in The One Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God and the Critique of Pure Reason; on Kant's philosophy of nature and dynamical matter in the Transcendental Analytic and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science; on Kant's doctrine of experience and objectivity in the Transcendental Deductions; on ontological reflection and the productive comportment of "life" in the Critique of Judgment; and on Kant's final theory of matter, life and production in the Opus Postumum.

In philosophy time is one of the most difficult subjects because, notoriously, it eludes rationalization. However, Bergson succeeds in presenting time effectively as reality that exists in its own right. Time in Bergson is almost accessible, almost palpable in a discourse which overcomes certain difficulties of language and traditional thought. Bergson equates time with duration, a genuine temporal succession of phenomena defined by their position in that succession, and asserts that time is a quality belonging to the nature of all things rather than a relation between supposedly static elements. But Bergson's theory of duration is not organised, nor is it complete - fragments of it are embedded in discussions of various aspects of psychology, evolution, matter, and movement. My first task is therefore to extract the theory of duration from Bergson's major texts in Chapters 2-4. In Chapters 5 and 6 I consider duration and time on an abstract level, as general metaphysical concepts, developing arguments beyond Bergson's explicit discourse. In particular, Bergson proposes the idea of duration as heterogeneity wherein all elements entwine and influence each other, and where the past contributes to the present. I challenge this unidirectional view of temporal reality and suggest that if in heterogeneity everything influences everything else, then subsequent temporal phases produce retrospective changes in previous temporal phases. Also, I challenge the exclusion of temporal relations from the theory of time, and incorporate into the theory of duration both time as a quality and time as a network of relations. Chapters 7 and 8 exemplify and concretise heterogeneous duration as self, examining various aspects of selfhood and its temporality. Chapter 9 deals with the problem of discontinuity within duration that emerges in chapters 7 and 8. Discontinuity comes through in various gaps and leaps involved in the existence of an individual consciousness and in the universal development of evolution, whereby the previous phase cannot account for the novelty of the following phase. I propose a way of saving the idea of the continuity of duration by changing one's observation point in regard to the observed process: the sense of discontinuity is due to our view of the past, contaminated by our knowledge in the present. Instead of examining temporal reality from the imagined present situated in the past to the actual present, we can look at it backwards, from the actual present into the past, descending from the new to the old, from the more complex to the less complex.

This thesis aims to determine what is distinctive to the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973). While his work has largely been received as a form of 'Christian existentialism' (notably by Jean-Paul Sartre), and thus interpreted in relation to other philosophies of existence, it is my contention that this prevents an appreciation of his specificity. I therefore recommend a new reading of his thought, which, through analysis of his various philosophical presentations of time, re-situates him within the twentieth-century French intellectual tradition. Part I of the thesis provides an introduction to his philosophy of time, analysing his position in specific relation to Henri Bergson (1859-1941). Chapter One raises the question as to whether his position is then compromised by his engagement with eternity, for this seems to undermine time's significance. However, what begins to emerge from Chapter Two onward, is that such a question may be inappropriate with respect to Marcel's understanding of philosophy. Part II (Chapters Three and Four) then explores the implications that his work’s various modes have on the content of his arguments: first, the diary-form of his formative works and his (continuing) use of a first-person narrative style in his essays and lectures; and second, the (non-narrative) form of his theatre, to which Marcel also accorded philosophical significance. Here, Marcel is read alongside Paul Ricœur (1913-2005) and Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995), who also tried to approach philosophy differently – as is especially manifest in their conceptions of time. Finally, Part III (Chapter Five) reconsiders the relation between Marcel’s philosophy and religion, asking how his references to God affect the basis of his philosophy, and what this entails for interpreting time in his work. In light of these discussions, the conclusion then reflects on what philosophy is for Marcel, and how he should therefore be received.

It is my contention that physics and metaphysics (or at least the aspects of metaphysics to be considered in this thesis) broadly strive to achieve common goals: to understand what our physical system is constituted by, and both how, and why it evolves in the way that it does. Metaphysicians, as well as the scientific disciplines, play an important role in our understanding of the universe. In recent years, physicists have focussed on finding accurate mathematical formalisms of the evolution of our physical system - if a metaphysician can uncover the metaphysical underpinnings of these formalisms; that is, why these formalisms seem to consistently map the universe, then our understanding of the world and the things in it is greatly enhanced. Science, then, plays a very important role in our project, as the best scientific formalisms provide us with what we, as metaphysicians, should be trying to interpret – but these interpretations are integral to understanding the nature of natural laws and causation. In this thesis I examine existing metaphysical views of what a law is (both from a conceptual and from a metaphysical perspective), show how closely causation is linked to laws, and provide a priori arguments for and against each of these positions. Ultimately, I provide an analysis of a number of metaphysics of natural laws and causation, apply these accounts to our best scientific theories, and see how these metaphysics fit in with our concepts of cause and law. Although I do not attempt a definitive metaphysical account myself, I conclude that any successful metaphysic will be a broadly Humean one, and furthermore that given the concepts of cause and law that shall be agreed upon, Humean theories allow for there to be causal sequences and laws (in line with our concepts) in the world.